A Spectacular Season for Men’s VolleyballSchool Record of 26 Wins and a Berth to the NCAAs

ByLarry Hertz

Vassar’s men’s volleyball team enjoyed one of the most successful seasons of any varsity squad in the college’s history this year, finishing with a 26-7 record and competing in the national championship tournament. But this success story begins four years ago when co-captain Trey Cimorelli ’17 reported for his first practice and saw a team that was, in his words, “pretty bad.”

For senior co-captains Trey Cimorelli, Quinn Rutledge, and Christian Lizana, four years of hard work paid off with a record-breaking season.Photo: Stockton Photo, Inc.

Cimorelli’s assessment proved to be painfully accurate: the Brewers won just 10 of 31 games that year. Rather than stewing about the poor showing, Cimorelli and some of his young teammates, including Quinn Rutledge ’17 and Christian Lizana ’17, decided to do something about it. “We looked at what the winning teams were doing, and we saw that we were too lackadaisical; we wanted to change that culture,” Lizana says.

Changing the culture meant more time in the weight room, more agility drills with the training staff and more informal time on the court, preparing for the next season. All of this work paid off, and so did the arrival of two highly skilled players in 2015, Matthew Knigge ’18 and Zechariah Lee ’18. The team posted an 18-13 record that year and improved to 24-7 in 2016 when Knigge was named a First Team All-American.

Coach Richard Gary led the program to its first appearance in the NCAA Division III championship tournament.Photo: Karl Rabe

This year, under first-year coach Richard Gary, the Brewers were ranked as high as second in the nation, went undefeated in the highly competitive United Volleyball Conference, and qualified for the NCAA Division III Championships, falling to defending champion and 2017 runner-up SUNY New Paltz in the quarterfinals. Knigge was named a First Team All-American for the second straight year, and Lee was selected to the Second Team. They were joined by Cimorelli and Lizana as All-United Volleyball Conference selections. Vassar finished the season ranked fifth in the country.

Two weeks after the NCAA championships, Cimorelli said the loss still stung, but he’s proud of what the team accomplished during his four years at Vassar. “The pinnacle of the sport at this level is going to the NCAAs, and we achieved that,” he says. “We talked about it at the beginning of the year and kept our focus throughout the season.”

Lizana, who served as a co-captain this year along with Cimorelli, says he and his teammates were aware they didn’t have the depth or the physicality of many of the squads they competed against. “We don’t have a deep roster, and we’re not as big and strong as a lot of other teams, so we had to make up for that with a competitive mindset, with passion and fire,” he says.

Gary, who coached at Wells College in Aurora, NY, before he came to Vassar, says he knew he was inheriting a good team “because they thumped Wells last year.” It didn’t take many practice sessions to confirm his assumption. “I was immediately impressed with their intelligence and fire, and they were receptive to new ideas,” Gary says. “I’m all about mental preparation and toughness and these guys had it.”

With two All-Americans returning and a solid recruiting class arriving in the fall, Gary says he expects great things from next year’s team. But he quickly adds he has to find players to replace the leadership Cimorelli, Lizana, and Rutledge provided. “We won’t be surprising anyone next year – other teams will be ready for us,” he says. “But this year’s experience at the NCAAs will be helpful as we go forward.”

Knigge agreed. “In my final season, I’ll not only be asked to play at a high level but to take a leadership role,” he says. “Those are big shoes to fill.”

Knigge, Cimorelli, and Lizana all praised Athletics Director Michelle Walsh, Strength Coach Cam Williams, and others in the department for their contributions to their Vassar athletics experience. And they said the creation of the Brewers Fund, a fundraising effort that targets the athletics program, was certain to help athletes in the future. “Vassar provided us with all we needed to thrive as student-athletes, and we’re so grateful for that,” Lizana says.

A Coach with a Classical Bent

Photo: Karl Rabe

Richard Gary is not your typical college coach. Most coaches played their sport in college. Gary did not. He was a standout in a fledgling program at his high school in Springfield, OR, but when he failed to get any offers from any recruiters at major colleges, he focused largely on academics at Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle, where he majored in playwriting.

Most college coaches don’t earn a master’s degree in Greek mythology, but Gary did. He resumed his volleyball career while he was studying mythology and writing his master’s thesis at the University of Bristol in England. Gary was captain of the Bristol team and split his time as a member of the British Universities National Team.

Gary returned to the U.S. in 2004 to accept adjunct teaching jobs at both Hartwick College and SUNY Oneonta in upstate New York. It was at Hartwick that he got his first college coaching “job,” although it paid virtually nothing at first. “I wandered over to the gym to watch some volleyball, and I ran into the women’s coach,” Gary recalls. “She told me her assistant had just quit and hired me on the spot, mostly because I was there.”

Gary left his teaching jobs and the Hartwick coaching job to coach and play on some semi-pro teams in the Netherlands, but he returned to the U.S. in 2012 to launch a men’s and women’s volleyball program at Wells College. The skill levels of the players who tried out for those first teams were rudimentary. “I had to teach things like, ‘You can’t catch the ball,’” he says. Gary told the men’s team that if they won a game, they could throw him in a lake on campus, “and in late March, when the ice was just beginning to melt, they won a game and threw me in.”

Now that he’s running an elite NCAA Division III program at Vassar, Gary says he wouldn’t trade any of his experiences. “All of them helped me get to where I am,” he says, and that includes his master’s thesis on French existentialist Albert Camus’ analysis of the Greek myth of Sisyphus. According to the myth, Sisyphus tricked the gods by holding Thanatos, the god of death, captive for 100 years. When he was finally caught, he was doomed to push a large rock to the crest of a hill, only to have it roll back to the bottom, endlessly.

Camus interpreted the myth as man’s futile search for meaning, but his essay concludes, “The struggle is itself enough to fill a man’s heart.”

“Sisyphus was happy when he went back down that hill, because what’s important is the work, not the result,” Gary says. “That’s something I try to keep in mind in coaching.”